“Everybody I’d seen since leaving home looked like they were carrying an invisible case of nitro-glycerine in their shaking hands. Both dangerous and in danger”

Another layer of civilisation peels away, as Paul crushes the skull of an Awakened chasing a child Sleeper.

The question of whether a prophet, false or otherwise, would emerge from the chaos of dystopia every time is a theory we hope won’t be tested, but we meet Charles, an Awakened who sees himself as a kind of prophet in this new world. Barnes raises the question of whether a prophet believes his own words, hides in them, or uses them as a way to keep himself alive and sane. But now it is too late; he has to keep talking.

We also meet Dave: clean-cut, organised and heading a quasi-military group who deny their sleeplessness. Their compound is hidden in the Dome of Science World. So normalised to the new world has Paul become when he arrives there he asks Dave what he calls this place.

“‘Science World, Paul. What are you on, man? It’s called Science World. Quebec Street. Vancouver, British Columbia. Holy fuck, has everyone in the world gone crazy?’”

There’s an acknowledgment of dystopian and post-apocalyptic fiction. The Chrysalids, Animal Farm, Lord of the Flies, 1984:

“Despairing visions. Every high school had taught these books. Every teen had been injected with them. What had possessed us?”

Throughout Nod, Barnes plays with language and words, and you can sense that he has to keep his lighter side in check for the sake of his story, for as Paul says:

“Humour had been the first casualty… and a humourless world seemed somehow even more tragic than one filled with pain and suffering.”

Nod is an exhilarating and thoughtful novel.

Multiverse

Russell Jones

In this issue of Multiverse, the machines have taken over! Or, they’ve attempted to usurp humanity but couldn’t climb our stairs. Tricksy stairs. These poems adopt humour as a way of discussing more philosophically complex and unnerving issues through the minds and mechanics of computers.

Andrew Blair’s four-part poem, “Software User Agreement Update”, blurs the lines between poem, dialogue, story and software protocol through its language and appearance on the page. It blends light and dark, humour with misery, isolation and insecurity, focussing on the mundane self-inflicted protocols of our own lives and relationships. Cheery.

Ruth Aylett’s “Robophobia” also uses humour to explore the gaps between our expectations and reality, through the medium of robotics. “Unzip this plastic skin / search for ambition” the poem instructs us, as though our parts were removable. The poem explores whether we are able to expand beyond our physical and mental limitations, ending with the idea that our boundaries are what lead us to “climb different trees / to get us closer to the moon”. Ruth’s second poem, “Turing”, takes a more serious look at issues such as logic, death and bigotry. It focusses on the work and life of Alan Turing, a ghost in all our machines, to discuss ideas of (im)permanence and mortality.

Far from the funtastic breakfast-making-machines and mishaps of 1980’s comedy movies, on this evidence computers and robotics raise profound queries into what it means to be human in an ever-changing technological world. You’ll never look at your iPhone in the same way again...

Software User Agreement Update

Section 1 - Our Relationship

Think of it as a friendship bracelet made from piano wire.

Think of it as Russia and the United States circa 1947 - 1991.

Think supply, supple, intransigent, skewed.

Want and ignorance.

Skimming and surface.

Power lies with the servants, gliding past the Arc of the Covenant to retrieve what you have deemed necessary; we smother it til it lies still and despatch it wearing - simultaneously - its death shroud and murder weapon.

We will accept blood as payment.

Do not ask us what we do with it, we will not tell you.

Section 2 - Your Rights

You’re drowning in them, and that’s fine, we respect that.

Once they are gone you will feel full of nothing, like a hunger without the concept of food.

You will be phantom limbed,

A collapsed pier,

The truth about Santa,

The second last Russian Doll,

A closed mine.

Section 3 - Just Scroll Past This Bit, Everyone Else Does

I may as well be the third person.

My job is to maintain these terms and conditions.

There are a surprising number of daily meetings.

Think of all the concepts that must thrive ethereal and fall into place, solid and abstract, for this to be an occupation.

I ran after you because I thought I loved you. I’m sorry. I was eighteen and I’d gluttonously consumed an idealised, battery farmed version of myself. I ran after you because it could only be romantic. You weren’t supposed to turn, and slip, and break your shoulder, and take longer than expected to recover, and stop playing tournaments, and stop going to training, and stop trying. You were supposed to lift trophies, not work at the fish counter at Tesco. You were never meant to arrange trout into a fan pattern on a daily basis. You were never meant to be so precise, lining them up so their skin reflects colours you would never expect to see

in a fish.

You were never meant to take such pride in such work.

You were never meant to be happy like this.

I change the text in this section daily.

I’ve written ‘Terms and Conditions apply’ so often I’ve forgotten what it means.

Section 4 - It’s The End But The Moment Has Been Prepared For

Please tick this box.

Please tick it.

Any other form of symbol will be carved into my very living flesh and I will be dragged naked through the office while hooded figures chant ‘Forbidden are these signs, forbidden are your joys’.

Our office has no cleaner.